Oprah's "Best Life Week" is coming to a close today, and yesterday's show was "Money Day" featuring Suze Orman. On their way into the show, audience members were asked how much credit card debt they had and 225 people admitted to having this type of debt.
Oprah's team then totaled the numbers submitted by the in-debt audience. Can you guess the total debt for these 225 people?
That averages out to $10,200 PER PERSON. Yikes!
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I should have done the math, Peggasus. I think that kind of answers my question. I'm guessing people average way more than $10,000 in debt from all sources (including mortgage, etc.) Thanks for posting!
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Wow!
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Wow.... I thought my card was bad, but now I feel pretty good about it!
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yay - it was a good guess! i think that we all seem to be getting a decent grasp on how much debt folks have - on average so that when you take a large audience size like that - you can estimate what the total is.
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Whoo, I guessed right!
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Well considering that 25 year old girl on Momma's Boys has 168,000 in credit card debt, i'm not all that surprised.
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I can't believe i guess right! That is sad!
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Wow, that's crazy! What are these people charging on their credit cards? I mean, I understand some people have trouble managing money, but an AVERAGE of $10,000? Crazy.
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I'd be interested to see if there were maybe one or two people who brought the average way up. That's a pretty small sample size.
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I guessed right! But now I'm disturbed by how few made up such a large debt...
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I can't believe it. And that's only credit card debt?!?!
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10,000 in credit card debt alone?? Holy crap, that's a lot. I could see maybe if they figured student loans and car payments in there, but 10K in credit cards is just way too much. Heck, if you have to carry a balance on your card, THAT'S too much in my opinion.
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The amount is $13,000, not 10. I know this because before I guessed the number (correctly) I multiplied 225 by 13 and came up with answer b.
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I watched that episode... crazy! I love Suze tho... I suggest everyone dl the free book on Oprah.com
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...$10,200 average??? Wow...out of 225 people? That's unbelievable...
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Wow! That is shocking! I am going to download the free Suze book - although the only debt I have is my mortgage....I definitely need some tips for saving more! 
On another note - is anyone else having problems seeing the user names for the commenters? All I see is the avatars and the "registered since" date.... 
It was lower than I expected, but debt reform is going to be a big thing in the next year so I think the overall debt of people will get smaller.
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Yikes.... esp. if it's just credit card debt.
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It seems like a lot, but I figured it would include mortgages, etc. - which could make the amount considerable higher than if it were just, say, credit card debt.
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I think it is just credit card debt. $13,000 would be an extremely small amount if it included mortgages, etc.
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I think a lot of Oprah's target market is part of the culture of entitlement. She spends a lot of time telling people "You deserve it!" So that could be a factor.
But I thought I read somewhere that $10,000 is the national average credit card debt per person.
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Is this the total debt or the total credit card debt? I see nothing wrong with having a mortgage, a car payment, and student loan payments, but having exorbitant amounts of credit card debt seems like a much bigger problem.
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